Summative Statement
The most difficult thing about researching and digging into Marina Abramović was that it felt like she was the only one saying the things she was saying. She opened up so many questions in me, but it seemed like no one else asked these same questions or felt the urge to come up with answers. How exactly do you phrase a question around the idea that “perhaps curiosity can trigger aggression through the desperation of the need for validation” without having to delve into a long explanation of how the question came to be and what the value of the answers might be? How do I describe the connection I felt between John Cage’s 4’33” and her The Artist is Present? On my blog, I labeled both pieces with #the power/beauty/value of silence, but even the word, “silence,” can have too many depths and colors. When John Cage talked about there not being such a thing as silence, was he asking us to evaluate the same thing that Abramović evaluated as she sat across from so many strangers without speaking?
The things that strike me as most impressive, or effective, about Abramović is her ability to speak to me without using what I have thus far considered the most effective channels of communication. The most powerful part of AAA-AAA was not Abramović or Ulay, it was the presence of two humans, it was the two humans so close together, it was the space between them, the force between them, the noises they were independently making, and the noises they made when their individual noises mingled. I’ve never seen anything like that before that video—something that really made me forget what I was looking at and listening to and contemplate solely what I was perceiving of these things. I have seen paintings that I think are achingly beautiful (Vrubel’s The Demon), paintings that represent everything I detest but are immeasurably beautiful (Vasnetsov’s Threshold of Paradise), but until I looked at Abramović’s works, I have never seen things that I thought were truly ugly looking but internalized them thoroughly anyway.
Now, the most interesting thing about Abramović is that she’s not so cruel as to only cause questions. She shows evidence. Evidence is not answers, and it is the very thing that causes questions in her art, but evidence is how we, as human beings, learn, discover, and cast off previous notions that weren’t supported by evidence but rather our own perceptions and assumptions. Her art is in the hypotheses she forms. The ability of her art to go horribly wrong or surprise her proves that she makes hypotheses rather than statements or expressions. The results of her performance are the same as the results of a scientific experiment, as it matters little whether or not the script was followed on not or if the hypothesis proved or disproved. What matters is that the result was observed and recorded, so that it could teach us something and pave the way for future exploration.
The lateral part of my research barely felt like an assignment, but was rather felt more like just a focused attempt to pay attention to behaviors and influences we do see in our daily lives, or see evidence of, and really take some time out to explore them. I made connections through the organization of my blog to suddenly start pondering what could be considered an altered state of consciousness. I am now certain that Abramović enters one in her performances, the only thing I’ll never get a chance to find out is whether it’s on purpose to shield herself, on purpose to be more accepting of change, subconsciously to protect herself, before the performance, during the performance, or any combination of multiple causes at multiple times. What states are most beneficial to us or perhaps most educational probably differs on a case by case basis, and I find it incredible to have explored this idea looking at performances instead of reading it in a textbook.
It’s interesting to see what I think is proof that we are not just brains being carried around by our bodies from one mental stimulus to another. Here is an artist, with an incredible amount of control over her mind and body, who can sit through pain, sit through emotion, can enter so many states of consciousness, but even she is governed by her world and environment. Abramović has a reason for doing her experiences in the real world rather than in just her mind and privately reflecting, aside from being an artist and therefore having a need to show others her transformations. The blazing petrol, the rose thorns, the act of yelling, the act of whipping herself, the situation of being yelled at, even the state of performing itself is what triggers her mind to flip an internal switch. Without these physical stimuli of interacting with her environment, she would not be stating today that her performances have changed her and continue to do so. It gives me pause and inspires me to consider the stimuli that change me, both for the long haul because they have touched me in a way that will never be forgotten, and in the briefest of moments when my entire mind starts to work differently because of a ritual I may have picked up, a natural defense of my brain, or a curiosity that might make me an entirely different person until it subsides.
Eroticism in Art
The term erotic is derived from Eros (Greek god of sexual love and beauty) and applied to art with human sexuality. The historic imagery of erotic art is explicit and implicit with human sexual behaviors, sometimes looked upon negatively because of codes and censorship. Sexual desire is a part of human nature, but ethical limits are imposed by society as we are regulated by sexual behavior. Human sexuality is restricted by social customs.
“The experience of beauty, the sensuous and rational are equally involved but the discussion is an extremely abstract one and, despite the hint that beauty is a symbol of morality, no account is developed as to how art and beauty may be conducive to moral life” (Cooper 123).
Erotic images are among the earliest surviving indications of human culture in the Paleolithic period, and Neolithic period; the earliest representation of human copulation is a carved stone from Ain Sakri in the Judaean Desert. Egyptian myths are represented in many papyruses depicting copulating couples with exaggerated sexual organs, such as the Papyrus of Tameniu from the 21st Dynasty (1069-945 BC).
In Classical Greece and Rome, the love stories of the gods were vitally necessary, both as powerfully erotic stimulation and as the symbolic representation of fertility in nature. Sex and religion were closely interwoven in art objects, from lamps and vases to paintings and sculptures, showing explicit sexual activities. Zeus or Jupiter, is the divine hero of many Classical legends, and his amorous conquests are depicted in many Greek vases, Roman lamps and cameos. Especially popular was the story of Leda; wife of King Tyndarus of Sparta. Marble reliefs from the 2nd century AD show the nude body of Leda helping the swan to penetrate her, encouraged by a naked cupid.
The female nude seems to dominate erotic art in the West since men have executed most paintings. Rarely is the nude painted dispassionately, for by its nature, it arouses the senses. However, the power of this attraction has led these types of works to be feared in a Judeo-Christian civilization, and the resulting censorship of explicit sexuality in art has resulted in works whose eroticism is deliberately veiled and whose erotic power is thereby increased. Whereas other world religions have regarded sexual pleasure as an important part of worship and have treated the sexual adventures of gods and goddesses as sacred texts, Christianity is a nonsexual religion. Since the Church was the main patron of the arts in the West until the 18th century, this process had a profound impact on painting and sculpture.
The new humanism of the Renaissance in Italy during the 15th century, with its revival of interest in the world of classical antiquity, led to dramatic changes in the progress of the arts. Religious subject matter is predominant in the art of the period, but erotic themes or undertones are often present. Certain Old Testament stories were ideal for erotic treatment. One of the most erotically powerful stories is the story of Judith, who seduces the enemy commander Holofernes and then cuts off his head during his recovery from the physical exertions of intercourse; this story was painted by Mantegna, Giorgione and Titian, among others.
Leda and the Swan was also painted by Titian, Correggio, Bronzino, Lorenzo Di Credi and Perino del Vaga. Raphael executed a drawing of Leda after a famous painting by Leonardo of the nude princess standing in a flowery meadow embracing the swan. Michelangelo painted the nude Leda in 1529 with the swan between her legs after the act of intercourse, its neck between her breasts and its beak touching her lips. One wing flutters in the air while the princess sinks into her pillows in post-coital exhaustion. In the 17th-century, the painting was destroyed and is only known through copies and reproduction.
The most notorious of Raphael’s erotic works are his History of Venus frescoes, executed in 1515 for
Cardinal Bibbiena’s bathroom in the Vatican. They were whitewashed over in the 19th century and are now in poor condition and forbidden to visitors.
The Fontainebleau school produced many scenes including “Two Court Ladies in the Bath” which is a nude portrait of Henry IV mistresses in the bath touching each other. I used this scene as a reference in my painting, “The Kiss” (2009). Using two Pop icons, Madonna and Britney Spears who famously kissed in front of a large TV audience shocking millions; the common thread and the link to my painting “The Kiss” is that both Madonna and Britney Spears are recognized mistresses of pop culture in our society.
The Baroque period includes many representations of swooning and ecstatic saints, suggesting repressed sexuality. The most famous example is perhaps Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s life-size marble sculpture of the Ecstasy of St Theresa. Bernini seems far more focused on the sensuality of the body in which the Saint appears to be in the throes of orgasm as she reclines beneath the beautiful young angel and his arrow, as visual metaphor for the divine penis. “Eroticism is assenting to life even in death” (Magritte 636).
The 18th century was not only the Age of Reason as Thomas Paine called but also the Age of Pleasure. French paintings of the period reflect the fun-loving atmosphere of court life; the joys of lovemaking were celebrated with official approval. The open celebration of sexuality in much of the 18th-century art found little parallel in the 19th century, which paradoxically proved to be a period more obsessed with sex than any before it.
Neoclassical art contained strong erotic images. The nudes painted by Ingres, such as the Valpinçon Bather and the Grande Odalisque, reveal an obsession with the sexual attraction of the female nude body.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the association of sex with death became characteristic of artists associated with decadence and decline. One of their characteristic themes was that of woman as a mysterious goddess, using her sexuality to dominate men. The sexual hypocrisy that required so many artists to hide or suppress the eroticism in their work during the 19th century waned considerably during the 20th century, when a compulsive degree of self-revelation became characteristic in art.
In the early 20th century the diverse aspects of sexual experience had become the dominant theme. The Surrealists were aware of the revolutionary nature of free erotic expression, inspired by Freud’s argument that “sexuality lay at the root of all creativity, they explored on erotic feelings.” Thus Surrealist erotic art has a fascinating intensity that can have a strong effect on the viewer, communicating often on a direct level of the subconscious. Dreams and nightmares, personal fetishes and sexual games all play an important role in Surrealist erotic imagery. Rather than concentrate on genital organs, the Surrealists preferred to transform the whole body into an erotic arena for exciting experiences.
By the second half of the 20th century there was a more sustained interest in erotic art. American artists have concentrated on the forbidden subject of the penis, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Brigid Polk and Andy Warhol. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe set out to create images that would be artistically beautiful, but also erotically charged. “Man in a Polyester Suit” (1981) shows a black man seen only from chest to knee, with an enormous flaccid penis hanging out of the open zipper of his pants. One of the most controversial experiments in eroticism was the exhibition of work by Jeff Koons at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Koons’ series of life-size sculptures and enormous photo-screen prints were entitled “Made in Heaven” and depicted in explicit detail the artist and his wife, making love.
The nude body is beauty in its purest form, and has been a subject used to express formulations about life; not only representing the body, but the relations of all structures that have become part of the imaginative experience. Without it, we would lose a large perspective of art history as it relates to human sexuality and moral judgment.
On Nudity and Sex in Art
(Follow source link at the bottom for painting examples)
· The nude is a “term used to describe the depiction of a naked human figure in works of art”
· The nude figure can be found throughout the history of art. Some of the earliest nude figures can be found on Greek geometric pottery dating back to the 8th century BCE. During this period the number of images of male nudes greatly exceeded the amount of images of female nudes.
· In Greek art in the middle of the 7th century BCE, the first realistic statues of the male nude appeared known as the Kouros
· In the Classical period Greek sculptors had studied and become masters of human anatomy. The artists of this period began to idealize the human form. The idealization of the human form can be seen in the nude female statue of Aphrodite of Knidos.
Aphrodite of Knidos, c. 360-340 BCE, marble.
· In the middle Ages the nude figure takes on a much different meaning than it previously had in art. The nude figure was an image that was rarely used by artists of this period. When a nude figure or figures were present in art, they were usually used as representatives of sin.
· The nude figure returns to art as a popular subject in the Renaissance period. The nude figure however is used by artists in Renaissance Italy much differently than by the Renaissance artists of Northern Europe.
· The Baroque period presents nudity in a much more sensual way. The nudes appear to be much more naturalistic, these artists were looking back to antiquity and the idea of perfecting the human body.
· In the 19th and 20th century the classical depiction of the nude was challenged by artists working in the modern period (1800 to present).
· Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical discoveries in the 20th century had a major effect on art and how nudity in art was interpreted.
· Erotic art can be defined as, “art with a sexual content, and especially to art that celebrates human sexuality.” The imagery can be “either explicitly or implicitly sexual.”
· Pornography as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, means: 1. the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement . 2. material (as books or a photograph) that depicts erotic behavior and is intended to cause sexual excitement. 3. the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction <the pornography of violence>.
· In the Paleolithic period c. 30,000 and 10, 000 BCE the earliest erotic images can be found. An example of this early erotic artwork is the Venus of Willendorf, found in Austia.
· From the Neolithic period (c. 9000-7000 BCE) a number of erotic images have been discovered. These images and small sculptures are primarily related to fertility and the fertility cults.
· From the 1st century BCE, the wall paintings at Pompeii contain numerous images of erotic art.
· In Classical Greek and Roman art erotic images were frequently used, many of which portrayed love stories of their gods.
· In the Renaissance period a majority of the art produced was of religious subject matter. The artists in this period however did use erotic tones in the religious stories of both the Old and New Testament.
· Renaissance artists also created erotic art, by using characters from Greek mythology as subjects in their works.[ix] The painting La Primavera by Sandro Botticelli (1477-78 Panel, 315 x 205 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) [...] is an excellent example of an erotic mythological subject.
· The subject of the erotic continued to flourish in art throughout the 16th to 18th century. The subject matter for which erotic tones were used for stayed fairly consistent during this long period.
· In the 18th century the French Court encouraged artists to create works dealing with love and sexual pleasures. Some of the French artists stayed with the traditional portrayal of eroticism through mythological and religious subject matter. Other artists created a new way to portray eroticism through art by using aspects of French court life or the implication of love making as their subject matter.
· In the 19th century artists took the subject of the erotic further, by depicting prostitutes, brothels, and lesbians in their artwork. Images of this type were considered highly inappropriate and were rejected by the Salons.
· In the 20th century the Surrealist group was greatly “inspired by Freud’s argument that sexuality lay at the root of all creativity.” The Surrealists created erotic art that “has a ompulsive intensity that can have a deep effect on the viewer, communicating often on a direct subconscious level.” An example of a form of eroticism used by a Surrealist artist can be seen below in the painting Young Virgin Autosodomized by her own Chastity, by Salvador Dali (1934).
· In the 20th century to present the 21st century a photographer from Virginia named Sally Mann has been dealing with the controversies surrounding the subject matter of many of her photographs. The pictures Mann has taken of her children growing up capturing their innocence, have been claimed to be too sexual, pornographic, and erotic.
Self-flagellation Rituals Images
"People have been flagellating themselves for ages, as a ritual of religious celebration and mourning. Even young children are often cut in some countries during the rituals, to re-enact historical and biblical events. But hey, a little blood never hurt anybody, right?"
On Flagellation and Self-Flagellation
"The history of the whip, rod, and stick, as instruments of punishment and of voluntary penance, is a long and interesting one. The Hebrew words for "whip" and "rod", are in etymology closely related (Gesenius). Horace (Sat., I, iii) tells us not to use the horribile flagellum, made of thongs of ox-hide, when the offender deserves only the scutica of twisted parchment; the schoolmaster's ferula — Eng. ferule (Juvenal, Sat., I, i, 15) — was a strap or rod for the hand (see ferulein Skeat). The earliest Scriptural mention of the whip is in Exodus 5:14-16 (flagellati sunt; flagellis cœdimur), where theHeb. word meaning "to strike" is interpreted in the Greek and the Latin texts, "were scourged" — "beaten with whips". Roboam said (1 Kings 12:11, 14; 2 Chronicles 10:11, 14): "My father beat you with whips, but I will beat you with scorpions", i.e. with scourges armed with knots, points, etc. Even in Latin scorpio is so interpreted by St. Isidore (Etym., v, 27), "virga nodosa vel aculeata". Old-Testament references to the rod might be multiplied indefinitely (Deuteronomy 25:2, 3; 2 Samuel 7:14; Job 9:34; Proverbs 26:3, etc.). In the New Testament we are told that Christ used the scourge on the money-changers (John 2:15); He predicted that He and His disciples would be scourged (Mat., x, 17; xx, 19); andSt. Paul says: "Five times did I receive forty stripes, save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods" (2 Corinthians 11:24, 25;Deuteronomy 25:3; Acts 16:22). The offender was to be beaten in the presence of the judges (Deuteronomy 25:2, 3), but was never to receive more than forty stripes. To keep within the law, it was the practice to give only thirty-nine. The culprit was so attached to a Low pillar that he had to lean forward — "they shall lay him down", says the law, to receive the strokes. Verses of thirteen words in Hebrew were recited, the last always being: "But he is merciful, and willforgive their sins: and will not destroy them" [Psalm 77:38]; but the words served merely to count the blows. Mosesallowed masters to use the rod on slaves; not, however, so as to cause death (Exodus 21:20). The flagellation of Christwas not a Jewish, but a Roman punishment, and was therefore administered all the more cruelly. It was suggested byPilate's desire to save Him from crucifixion, and this was inflicted only when the scourging had failed to satisfy the Jews. In Pilate's plan flagellation was not a preparation, but rather a substitute, for crucifixion.
As the earliest monuments of Egypt make the scourge or whip very conspicuous, the children of Israel cannot have been the first on whom the Egyptians used it. In Assyria the slaves dragged their burdens under the taskmaster's lash. InSparta even youths of high social standing were proud of their stoical indifference to the scourge; while at Rome the various names for slaves (flagriones, verberones, etc.) and the significant term lorarii, used by Plautus, give us ample assurance that the scourge was not spared. However, from passages in Cicero and texts in the New Testament, we gather that Roman citizens were exempt from this punishment. The bamboo is used on all classes in China, but in Japanheavier penalties, and frequently death itself, are imposed upon offenders. The European country most conspicuous at the present day for the whipping of culprits is Russia, where the knout is more than a match for the worst scourge of theRomans. Even in what may be called our own times, the use of the whip on soldiers under the English flag was not unknown; and the State of Delaware yet believes in it as a corrective and deterrent for the criminal class. If we refer to the past, by Statute 39 Eliz., ch. iv, evil-doers were whipped and sent back to the place of their nativity; moreover, Star-chamber whippings were frequent. "In Partridge's Almanack for 1692, it is stated that Oates was whipt with a whip of six thongs, and received 2256 lashes, amounting to 13536 stripes" (A Hist. of the Rod, p. 158). He survived, however, and lived for years. The pedagogue made free use of the birch. Orbillus, who flogged Horace, was only one of the learned line who did not believe in moral suasion, while Juvenal's words: "Et nos ergo manum ferulæ subduximus" (Sat., I, i, 15) show clearly the system of school discipline existing in his day. The priests of Cybele scourged themselves and others, and such stripes were considered sacred. Although these and similar acts of penance, to propitiate heaven, were practised even before the coming of Christ, it was only in the religion established by Him that they found wise direction and real merit. It is held by some interpreters that St. Paul in the words: "I chastise my body" refers to self-inflicted bodily scourging (1 Corinthians 9:27). The Greek word hypopiazo (see Liddell and Scott) means "to strike under the eye", and metaphorically "to mortify"; consequently, it can scarcely mean "to scourge", and indeed in Luke 18:5, such an interpretation is quite inadmissible. Furthermore, where St. Paul certainly refers to scourging, he uses a different word. We may therefore safely conclude that he speaks here of mortification in general, as Piconio holds (Triplex Expositio).
Scourging was soon adopted as a sanction in the monastic discipline of the fifth and following centuries. Early in the fifth century it is mentioned by Palladius in the "Historia Lausiaca" (c. vi), and Socrates (Church History IV.23) tells us that, instead of being excommunicated, offending young monks were scourged. See the sixth-century rules of St. Cæsarius ofArles for nuns (P.L., LXVII, 1111), and of St. Aurelian of Arles (ibid., LXVIII, 392, 401-02). Thenceforth scourging is frequently mentioned in monastic rules and councils as a preservative of discipline (Hefele, "Concilieng.", II, 594, 656). Its use as a punishment was general in the seventh century in all monasteries of the severe Columban rule (St. Columbanus, in "Regula Cœnobialis", c. x, in P.L., LXXX, 215 sqq.); for later centuries of the early Middle Ages see Thomassin, "Vet. ac nova ecc. disciplina, II (3), 107; Du Cange, "Glossar. med. et infim. latinit.", s.v. "Disciplina"; Gretser, "De spontaneâ disciplinarum seu flagellorum cruce libri tres" (Ingolstadt, 1603); Kober, "Die körperliche Züchtigung als kirchlichesStrafmittel gegen Cleriker und Mönche" in Tüb. "Quartalschrift" (1875). The Canon law (Decree of Gratian, Decretals ofGregory IX) recognized it as a punishment for ecclesiastics; even as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it appears in ecclesiastical legislation as a punishment for blasphemy, concubinage, and simony. Though doubtless at an early date a private means of penance and mortification, such use is publicly exemplified in the tenth and eleventh centuries by the lives of St. Dominic Loricatus (P.L., CXLIV, 1017) and St. Peter Damian (died 1072). The latter wrote a special treatise in praise of self-flagellation; though blamed by some contemporaries for excess of zeal, his example and the high esteem in which he was held did much to popularize the voluntary use of the scourge or "discipline" as a means of mortification and penance. Thenceforth it is met with in most medieval religious orders and associations. The practice was, of course, capable of abuse, and so arose in the thirteenth century the fanatical sect of the Flagellants, though in the same period we meet with the private use of the "discipline" by such saintly persons as King Louis IX and Elizabeth ofThuringia."
Ayako Kato on Marina Abramović
"Marina Abramović’s work demands extreme endurance for both herself and her audience members through the often long durational nature of her works. As seen in this reenactment of her work Seven Easy Pieces (2005), seven hours is a familiar duration for Abramović due to the normal opening hours for galleries and museums. Abramović states that audiences may not see the performance starting and ending. Other works, Relation is Movement (1977) and one of twenty-two Nightsea Crossing performances (1981 – 87), lasted 16 hours. Great Wall Walk (1988) took 90 days when Abramović and Ulay, her collaborator since 1976, walked from eastern and western opposite ends of the wall until they met and actually finished their partnership in reality.
[...]
Pain, endurance and self-flagellation are notably seen in Lips of Thomas (1975) which is included in Seven Easy Pieces, by her eating a kilogram of honey, drinking a liter of red wine, and then incising a pentagram in her stomach with broken glass. Loop and repetition often add significance in her works. In Lips and Thomas, she violently whips herself until she no longer feels any pain (Abramović 196). She explores the physical and mental limitations of the body. The elements of ancient mythology, ritual, and religion can be seen as pentagram in Lips of Thomas, and the symbol recalls The Vitruvian Manby Leonard da Vinci.
For her later work Biesenbach states, “Through the series of autobiographical works, Abramović has come to terms with her cultural, ideological, and spiritual origins in the Balkans, her family background, and the guilt and shame she felt over the genocidal atrocities in Serbia in the 1990s” (Biesenbach16). With the act of self-purification, she scrubbed skeleton in Cleaning the Mirror #1. In Balkan Baroque (1997), she sat for six hours a day for four hours to scrub, brush and scrape the meat off 6,000 pounds of blood-stained cow bones surrounded by three-channel projection of life-size images of Abramović and her parents.
Through the nude, Abramović presents herself in her art as a self-portrait, and it “manifests individuals in their most basic, reduced, pure, vulnerable state, their most equal state in relation to the rest of the world” (Biesenbach 18). With a human skeleton, she goes even further to reveal “bare bones.”
The statement below shows Abramović’s recent reflection upon duration:
I would like somehow to find a system so the performance would become life. That it actually becomes just timeless. I don’t want an audience to spend time with me looking at my work; I want them to be with me and forget about time. Open up the space and just that moment of here and now, of nothing, there is no future and there is no past. In that way, you can extend eternity. It is about being present. (Abramović 211)
Through all the essence together with the extensive duration and emergence of vulnerable, yet empowered state, Abramović’s performances reveal the different, but similar historical and personal human events in common and create reverberation in viewers’ memories and experiences through the feeling of eternity."
COURTING THE MUSE
"What a strange lot writers are, we questers after the perfect word, the glorious phrase that will somehow make the exquisite avalanche of consciousness sayable. We who live in mental barrios, where any roustabout idea may turn to honest labor, if only it gets the right incentive -- a bit of drink, a light flogging, a delicate seduction, I was going to say that our heads are our offices or charnel houses, as if creativity lived in a small walk-up flat in Soho. We know the mind doesn't dwell in the brain alone, so the where of it is as much a mystery as the how. Katherine Mansfield once said that it took "terrific hard gardening" to produce inspiration, but I think she meant something more willful than Picasso's walks in the forests of Fontainebleau, where he got an overwhelming "indigestion of greenness," which he felt driven to empty onto a canvas. Or maybe that's exactly what she meant, the hard gardening of knowing where and when and for how long and precisely in what way to walk, and then the will to go out and walk it as often as possible, even when one is tired or isn't in the mood, or has only just walked it to no avail. Artists are notorious for stampeding their senses into duty, and they've sometimes used remarkable tricks of synesthesia.
Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. When I mentioned this macabre bit of gossip to a poet friend, he said acidly: "If only someone had thought to shut it." Picture Dame Edith, rehearsing the posture of the grave as a prelude to the sideshows on paper she liked to stage. The straight and narrow was never her style. Only her much-ridiculed nose was rigid, though she managed to keep it entertainingly out of joint for most of her life. What was it exactly about that dim, contained solitude that spurred her creativity? Was it the idea of the coffin or the feel, smell, foul air of it that made creativity possible?
Edith's horizontal closet trick may sound like a prank unless you look at how other writers have gone about courting their muses. The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word. Then he would close the drawer, although the fragrance remained in his head. Researchers at Yale University discovered that the smell of spiced apples has a powerful elevating effect on people and can even stave off panic attacks. Schiller may have sensed this all along. Something in the sweet, rancid mustiness of those apples jolted his brain into activity while steadying his nerves. Amy Lowell, like George Sand, enjoyed smoking cigars while writing, and in 1915 went so far as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled. It was Lowell who said she used to "drop" ideas into her subconscious "much as one drops a letter into the mailbox. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head.... The words seem to be pronounced in my head, but with nobody speaking them." Then they took shape in a cloud of smoke. Both Dr. Samuel Johnson and the poet W. H. Auden drank colossal amounts of tea -- Johnson was reported to have frequently drunk twenty-five cups at one sitting. Johnson did die of a stroke, but it's not clear if this was related to his marathon tea drinking. Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin, and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote in the nude. D. H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees -- a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts.
Colette used to begin her day's writing by first picking fleas from her cat, and it's not hard to imagine how the methodical stroking and probing into fur might have focused such a voluptuary's mind. After all, this was a woman who could never travel light, but insisted on taking a hamper of such essentials as chocolate, cheese, meats, flowers, and a baguette whenever she made even brief sorties. Hart Crane craved boisterous parties, in the middle of which he would disappear, rush to a typewriter, put on a record of a Cuban rumba, then Ravel's Bolero, then a torch song, after which he would return, "his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair straight up from his skull. He would be chewing a five-cent cigar which he had forgotten to light. In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript.... 'Read that,' he would say, 'isn't that the greatest poem ever written!'" This is Malcolm Cowley's account, and Cowley goes on to offer even more examples of how Crane reminded him of "another friend, a famous killer of woodchucks," when the writer "tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place by drinking and laughing and playing the phonograph."
Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every morning before working on The Charterhouse of Parma -- "in order" he said, "to acquire the correct tone." Willa Cather read the Bible. Alexandre Dumas pere wrote his nonfiction on rose-colored paper, his fiction on blue, and his poetry on yellow. He was nothing if not orderly, and to cure his insomnia and regularize his habits he went so far as to eat an apple at seven each morning under the Arc de Triomphe. Kipling demanded the blackest ink he could find and fantasized about keeping "an ink-boy to grind me Indian ink," as if the sheer weight of the blackness would make his words as indelible as his memories.
Alfred de Musset, George Sand's lover, confided that it piqued him when she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk, as she often did. But surely that was not so direct as Voltaire, who used his lover's naked back as a writing desk. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself "a completely horizontal writer." Writing students often hear that Hemingway wrote standing up, but not that he obsessively sharpened pencils first, and, in any case, he wasn't standing up out of some sense of himself as the sentinel of tough, ramrod prose, but because he had hurt his back in a plane crash. Poe supposedly wrote with his cat sitting on his shoulder. Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were all standers; and Robert Hendrickson reports in The Literary Life and Other Curiosities that Aldous Huxley "often wrote with his nose." In The Art of Seeing, Huxley says that "a little nose writing will result in a perceptible temporary improvement of defective vision."
Many nonpedestrian writers have gotten their inspiration from walking. Especially poets -- there's a sonneteer in our chests; we walk around to the beat of iambs. Wordsworth, of course, and John Clare, who used to go out looking for the horizon and one day in insanity thought he found it, and A. E. Housman, who, when asked to define poetry, had the good sense to say: "I could no more define poetry than a terrier can a rat, but I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us.... If I were obliged ... to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion." After drinking a pint of beer at lunch, he would go out for a two- or three-mile walk and then gently secrete.
I guess the goal of all these measures is concentration, that petrified mirage, and few people have written about it as well as Stephen Spender did in his essay "The Making of a Poem":
There is always a slight tendency of the body to sabotage the attention of the mind by providing some distraction. If this need for distraction can be directed into one channel -- such as the odor of rotten apples or the taste of tobacco or tea -- then other distractions outside oneself are put out of the competition. Another possible explanation is that the concentrated effort of writing poetry is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body. It is a disturbance of the balance of the body and mind and for this reason one needs a kind of anchor of sensation with the physical world.
This explains, in part, why Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand, and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub. In fact, Franklin brought the first bathtub to the United States in the 1780s and he loved a good, long, thoughtful submersion. In water and ideas, I mean. Ancient Romans found it therapeutic to bathe in asses' milk or even in crushed strawberries. I have a pine plank that I lay across the sides of the tub so that I can stay in a bubble bath for hours and write. In the bath, water displaces much of your weight, and you feel light, your blood pressure drops. When the water temperature and the body temperature converge, my mind lifts free and travels by itself. One summer, lolling in baths, I wrote an entire verse play, which mainly consisted of dramatic monologues spoken by the seventeenth-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz; her lover, an Italian courtier; and various players in her tumultuous life. I wanted to slide off the centuries as if from a hill of shale. Baths were perfect.
The Romantics, of course, were fond of opium, and Coleridge freely admitted to indulging in two grains of it before working. The list of writers triggered to inspirational highs by alcohol would occupy a small, damp book. T. S. Eliot's tonic was viral -- he preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam.
Many writers I know become fixated on a single piece of music when they are writing a book, and play the same piece of music perhaps a thousand times in the course of a year. While he was writing the novel The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, Paul West listened nonstop to sonatinas by Ferruccio Busoni. He had no idea why. John Ashbery first takes a walk, then brews himself a cup of French blend Indar tea, and listens to something post-Romantic ("the chamber music of Franz Schmidt has been beneficial" he told me). Some writers become obsessed with cheap and tawdry country-and-western songs, others with one special prelude or tone poem. I think the music they choose creates a mental frame around the essence of the hook. Every time the music plays, it re-creates the emotional terrain the writer knows the book to live in. Acting as a mnemonic of sorts, it guides a fetishistic listener to the identical state of alert calm, which a brain-wave scan would probably show.
When I asked a few friends about their writing habits, I thought for sure they'd fictionalize something offbeat -- standing in a ditch and whistling Blake's "Jerusalem," perhaps, or playing the call to colors at Santa Anita while stroking the freckled bell of a foxglove. But most swore they had none -- no habits, no superstitions, no special routines. I phoned William Gass and pressed him a little.
"You have no unusual work habits?" I asked, in as level a tone as I could muster. We had been colleagues for three years at Washington University, and I knew his quiet professorial patina concealed a truly exotic mental grain.
"No, sorry to be so boring," he sighed. I could hear him settling comfortably on the steps in the pantry. And, as his mind is like an overflowing pantry, that seemed only right.
"How does your day begin?"
"Oh, I go out and photograph for a couple of hours," he said.
"What do you photograph?"
"The rusty, derelict, overlooked, downtrodden parts of the city. Filth and decay mainly," he said in a nothing-much-to-it tone of voice, as casually dismissive as the wave of a hand.
"You do this every day, photograph filth and decay?"
"Most days."
"And then you write?"
"Yes."
"And you don't think this is unusual?"
"Not for me."
A quiet, distinguished scientist friend, who has published two charming books of essays about the world and how it works, told me that his secret inspiration was "violent sex." I didn't inquire further, but noted that he looked thin. The poets May Swenson and Howard Nemerov both told me that they like to sit for a short spell each day and copy down whatever pours through their heads from "the Great Dictator," as Nemerov labels it, then plow through to see what gems may lie hidden in the rock. Amy Clampitt, another poet, told me she searches for a window to perch behind, whether it be in the city or on a train or by the seaside. Something about the petri dish effect of the glass clarifies her thoughts. The novelist Mary Lee Settle tumbles out of bed and heads straight for her typewriter, before the dream state disappears. Alphonso Lingis -- whose unusual books, Excesses and Libido, consider the realms of human sensuality and kinkiness -- travels the world sampling its exotic erotica. Often he primes the pump by writing letters to friends. I possess some extraordinary letters, half poetry, half anthropology, he sent me from a Thai jail (where he took time out from picking vermin to write), a convent in Ecuador, Africa (where he was scuba-diving along the coast with filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl), and Bali (where he was taking part in fertility rituals).
Such feats of self-rousing are awkward to explain to one's parents, who would like to believe that their child does something reasonably normal, and associates with reasonably normal folk, not people who sniff rotten apples and write in the nude. Best not to tell them how the painter J. M. W. Turner liked to be lashed to the mast of a ship and taken sailing during a real hell-for-weather storm so that he could be right in the middle of the tumult. There are many roads to Rome, as the old maxim has it, and some of them are sinewy and full of fungus and rocks, while others are paved and dull. I think I'll tell my parents that I stare at bouquets of roses before I work. Or, better, that I stare at them until butterflies appear. The truth is that, besides opening and closing mental drawers (which I picture in my mind), writing in the bath, beginning each summer day by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so, listening obsessively to music (Alessandro Marcello's oboe concerto in D minor, its adagio, is what's nourishing my senses at the moment), I go speed walking for an hour every single day. Half of the oxygen in the state of New York has passed through my lungs at one time or another. I don't know whether this helps or not. My muse is male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly."
Excerpt from A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
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